


The Civilizing Parker Job

by GrumpyJenn



Category: Leverage
Genre: Flashbacks, In Medias Res, Mild Language, Post-Series, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-26
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-22 16:21:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2514164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrumpyJenn/pseuds/GrumpyJenn





	1. The Family

The five of us – sometimes a few more, but usually just the five of us – had great jobs. It was a sort of Robin Hood thing, one I continued when Nate put me in charge.

But the four of them – the Mastermind, the Grifter, the Hitter and the Hacker – they had a special job.

Civilizing me.

Oh, there were others, like Archie and Maggie, even Tara and Peggy. But those four, my team; they were the four who really took me on.

My team.

My _family_.


	2. The Father

_Sometimes they say Archie’s the closest thing to a father I’ve ever had. Maybe he was, once. But then there was Nate, and Nate was… yeah, he was my father in all the ways that count._

Parker looked up at Nate, and he felt both proud and so, _so_ sad. This poor kid, handed an awful lot of crap, but she took it and she ran with it, and she carved a life out of it. A dysfunctional life, to be sure, but it worked for her, and she thrived in it as much as she could.

All by herself.

He wondered how old she was, and whether she was entirely sure herself. By her looks she could be anywhere from her late teens to about thirty, although Nate suspected she was in her early twenties, like Hardison.

Like Hardison. Now there was an interesting pair. She seemed to like him; she even let him touch her, which she never did with other people, especially men. Nate wondered sometimes whether he’d have to add child molestation to his mental list of the horrors Parker had gone through as a kid. She showed some of the classic signs, but not all, and given her social skills – or lack of them – there might well be other reasons for her reticence about being touched.

She was learning, though, and part of him was so very proud of her. This tough little thing with surprising vulnerable spots, the one who doesn’t quite get people, has no sense of humor, but is slowly learning that other people are, well, _people_.

That was a hell of a thing, coming up from what sounded like a horrific time in the system, a kid who’d have likely had problems even with her own family – Nate thought she probably had Asperger’s or something else on the spectrum – much less in a series of foster homes that seemed to go from bad to worse.

Parker was difficult, wild, quirky, a bundle of phobias and social missteps and weird little inconsistencies of personality. But somehow she’d made it work, had managed to deal with bad foster families and the death of a brother and juvie and so many other hard knocks, and survived.

 _That’s the point,_ Nate thought, _she survived._ It may not have started out as a functional sort of life, but it was slowly getting there, as she learned to do more than just cope with the crap thrown at her by life.

She was learning to trust other people, and when Sophie wiped away a tear and he followed her gaze to Parker, he was just in time to see his little girl throw her arms around Hardison, and for Alec to hug her back, gently, as though she was precious and fragile and _cherished_.

And Nate felt some tears of his own prick his eyes, and not just for the woman they’d helped with this job, or for her dead husband.

No, these were for Parker, and in celebration of her finally, _finally_ being able to join the ranks of civilized human beings. Nate had no doubt she would still fling herself off buildings and fork bad guys in the shoulder, and just be basically weird. Those were the things that made her _Parker_.

But she’d finally shown that she was capable of being more than just the socially awkward thief.

And he was damn proud.


	3. The Mother

_Forget Robin Hood; with Sophie it was more like Pinocchio. With her help, I became a whole lot more like a real girl._

Sophie tried to feel pity for Parker, she really did. The girl’s upbringing and her childhood had been, well, pitiful. But she found that she couldn’t; there was something about Parker that made pity the wrong emotion. Compassion, of course, and affection and a certain perplexity, because Parker was _odd_. But there was a strong brave little soldier aspect to Parker that defied an emotion as simple as pity. 

It was during Sophie’s sabbatical from the team that the one mark had hurt Parker badly enough that she’d nearly broken down. During the sabbatical, but Tara had told Sophie what had happened. So had Nate, and Alec, and even Eliot had brought it up. If _Eliot_ was talking about how someone had hurt Parker in tones that sounded as though he was only just in control of his formidable temper, then Sophie knew it was serious.

And she hadn’t been there; she’d been too busy getting her own head together. Sophie felt guilty for that for a long time. She was meant to be there, she was the nurturer and the team mum. And if anyone needed a little nurturing, it was Parker. Although Alec was a nurturer too, and he and Parker clicked.

Sometimes Sophie thought that Parker didn’t need anyone but Alec anyway; she seemed to turn toward him like a flower toward the sun. Alec was a toucher, and surprisingly, Parker _let_ him touch her. Even Sophie could seldom touch Parker; the girl would just shy away from almost anyone. Except one Alec Hardison, so Sophie figured Parker thought of him as safe.

He clearly adored her, too, and Sophie was glad for it. Grifter or not, she herself hadn’t the skills – or the heart after what that false psychic had done – to draw someone like Parker out of her very well-crafted shell. But Alec did, and it was never more evident than when he had been trapped underground in that coffin. He spent so much time and energy making sure Parker felt safe, that when he was the one needing help, needing _Parker_ , she managed to pull him out of there still sane.

There were hugs all around – they had been so frightened for him – but Parker clearly had had enough, needed to retreat for awhile to deal with all those messy, frightening emotions on her own terms and in her own time.

It appeared that Alec knew that, and he let it ride, just looked at her in understanding and gratitude and affection as she backed away, overcome with unaccustomed emotion. Sophie could see it, and it seemed that even Parker could. That was an enormous improvement in Parker’s social development, certainly; she was starting to realize that she could be needed by someone other than herself.

And that she needed someone else, as she had when they’d had to rescue her. Or when she’d flung her arms around Alec after coming down off the mountain. Seeking comfort in the arms of another person.

 _She loves him. She might not quite realize it yet,_ Sophie thought, _but she loves him._

And he loves her.

Sophie worried about them, all three of them. Eliot, a good boy with a horrific past, full of anger and pain and self-loathing. Alec, sweet and patient and funny , full of razor wit and a solid core of decency, and probably very easily hurt. And Parker, terrified of her own vulnerability and unable to see that the boys – and Sophie and Nate – truly cared about her.

Maybe it was pity Sophie felt, after all. Or it had been.

Because now, all Sophie could see in Parker was triumph.


	4. The Brother

_At some point, ‘There’s something_ wrong _with you,” started to sound a whole lot more like, ‘Love ya, little sis.’ I don’t know when, but it did._

When Eliot Spencer met Parker, he was not impressed.

She was a decent thief, but she was truly messed up, and Eliot just… after all the bullshit he’d been through and all the terrible things he’d done, he just didn’t have the patience to deal with someone as screwed up as Parker. She’d just have to do her job and he’d do his, and that was that.

And if he threw her an exasperated _there’s something_ wrong _with you_ sometimes, so what? It didn’t seem to bother her any.

But then that asshole of a fake psychic hurt her, and Eliot surprised himself with how supremely pissed off that made him. _Yes_ , there was something wrong with her. But whatever that something wrong was, it made her kind of… innocent. Sort of like a wild animal was innocent; it didn’t kill you out of malice. It just needed something and you were in the way. There wasn’t actually a mean bone anywhere in Parker, but if you got between her and her goal, she’d do her best to move you out of the way.

It didn’t really matter, anyway. Parker was like a kid in some ways, innocent even when she did creepy and violent things – unlike Eliot himself – because she just didn’t know any better.

And Eliot had always had a soft spot for kids, especially the broken ones.

So when he saw Parker all huddled up on the floor like a child ready to suck her thumb any minute, something inside Eliot broke just a little more than it already had. “He’s not a psychic Parker. He’s just a con man.”

Eliot could feel Hardison beside him, tense with anger at the psychic, but trying his best to keep his voice gentle and calm for Parker’s sake. Even Tara seemed sympathetic, so when Parker suggested killing the fake psychic in the most painful way she could think of, Eliot pointed out that he could in fact arrange that if she really wanted him to.

He would have, too, because that rat bastard had _hurt_ her.

They did it the other way, and that was good too.

But he would have liked to take the asshole apart piece by piece, and he suspected that Parker and Hardison would have joined him. Gleefully.

Eliot still told her there was something wrong with her, but now she would give him that impish grin or the little laugh with the snort at the end, instead of just ignoring it. And he added hurting her feelings – she’d never have showed it, she didn’t know how, but he knew – to his pile of sins.

They worked together well, and if Eliot felt a touch more protective of Parker than he did the rest of the team, he didn’t examine that too carefully. She was a kid, that’s all, her and Hardison both, and they needed protecting. Sophie could talk her way out of almost anything, and Nate was almost as good. But Parker – and Hardison, sometimes – they were vulnerable. And Eliot did _not_ intend to see them hurt or worse.

So when he and Parker were stuck in that crevasse up on the mountain, she chose that moment to lose some of that wild-animal innocence, and she fought him over leaving the body there. But they had to get out of there, and he understood that she just wanted to get the lady’s husband back to her, but he couldn’t let her do it. So he talked her out of it, and he made her cry, but it had to be done.

Parker grew up a lot that day, and lost some of that innocence. But she brought the client’s husband back to her.

She grew up even more the day that they locked Hardison in a coffin, buried him alive, and it was _Parker_ who rescued Hardison that day, Parker more than anyone, even though they were all there. Because Parker kept Hardison sane through the whole ordeal.

Eliot heard all of it on the comms.

And if there was still something wrong with Parker, she was getting better at getting along in the real world with the rest of them.


	5. The Lover

_“Do you hear me, Alec? I need you!”_

God, he needed _her_.

Alec Hardison lay in the suffocating darkness _._

And remembered…

Parker’d always been quirky and weird, but it was a façade she showed to the world. It was on their job with the orphans that cracks had appeared, and the real girl underneath showed through.

That girl was desperately lonely but had no idea how to reach out. Hardison had met more than his share of the shy, the introverted, and the just plain strange. He was a hacker who played WoW in a kind of busman’s holiday, and he knew about strange. But Parker was different; she wasn’t just shy or even just strange.

Hardison thought it was probably closer to terrified.

She was scared to death that she might need someone else, or worse, that they might need her. But she trusted him enough to tell him she was afraid the orphans might turn out like her, and he _liked_ the way she was, and he told her so.

He found that underneath the quirks (and the phobias and the tendency to do things like forks to the shoulder when she felt threatened) that there was a good woman. Parker _wanted_ to do the right thing, but no-one had ever taught her how to figure out what that was.

Parker didn’t really show any of her insecurities for awhile after the orphans, like it was all she could manage, and Hardison backed off. Until the day that fake psychic cold-read her, and Hardison found himself torn between wanting to kill the asshole himself, and wanting to just grab hold of Parker and not let go. Ever.

Like when she hugged him when she came down the mountain, he could have held on to her forever.

But before that she was jealous, she… 

_Pretzels, I’m the pretzels_

It made Hardison giggle inside his head.

_Parker’s the mustard._

_Spicy l’il thang_

Shit, the lack of oxyg—

“Hardison! Move to your left!”

Oh God, oh _God_ , he was out, they got him out and Parker…

Parker was walking away, looking pale and scared and sick, but Hardison understood. She’d done it, kept him sane, been _needed_. She’d held it together, and now that the crisis was over, she could afford to fall apart.

He wanted to thank her, to tell her how amazing she had been, but she obviously couldn’t handle it right now. He’d leave it, tell her later when she’d calmed herself.

“I… n-never would’ve made it without…without you, you know that, right, Parker?”

She glanced at him, away again, not meeting his eyes. “Oh, that’s not true. Anyone can learn to hold their breath—.” She broke off as he went to kiss her cheek, ended up somewhere by the back of her jaw, near her ear.

“Thanks for not hanging up the phone,” he whispered, and let her be when he saw that a tear tracked down her face.

Because it meant she needed space, and time away from people.

So Hardison was surprised when Parker came to him after the job where she’d worn the heavy boots, and they’d danced, and he’d told her she had the team, she had _him_. He’d thought she would need that space and that time.

But she came to his place, appearing suddenly beside him in that Parker way she had, and bumped his shoulder with hers. “I…” she said, and stopped. “I never would have made it without you, you know that, right, Alec?”

Hardison felt his breath catch; she only called him by his first name when the situation was deadly serious, extreme emotional upheaval. And she wasn’t looking at him, but what she’d said sounded familiar, like she was trying to emulate… _oh_.

“Oh, that’s not true,” Hardison said, his voice hoarse. “Anyone…” but there he trailed off, because it _wasn’t_ something anyone could have done. Parker kissed his jaw right by the ear.

“Thanks for packing the ‘chute,” she whispered, and kissed him.

And _damn_ , she started it, and so he kissed her back.

 _Jesus_ , Hardison thought, _when it’s not faking it for a job, Parker is a_ hell _of a kisser._

But then she… stopped. She didn’t pull away, didn’t push him away, just tensed up and stopped moving her lips and her tongue and… well, _shit_. He must’ve scared her, because she had gone very, very still, like a mouse with a cat watching its hole. So Hardison was the one who pulled away, just slightly, because she didn’t pick up little social cues and she might think it was outright rejection.

Which it definitely was not, so he pulled away just a bit and rested his forehead on hers. She didn’t ease away from his forehead or his hands on her biceps, but she was still practically vibrating from tension “What is it, baby?” It was as soft and nonthreatening a tone as he could manage at the moment, with his mouth dry with wanting her. _Oh_ , he thought, _maybe she hasn’t…_ “Have you done this before?”

“Once. I didn’t like it.”

“You didn’t like…” _Oh no,_ he thought. “Baby girl, did someone… f-force you to…”

Her eyes flew to meet his for just a second as she pulled back a little. “I would have broken anyone who tried to rape me in half,” she said fiercely. “And I would _like_ it.”

“Then did I scare you?” _God, I hope I didn’t scare you…_

Parker shook her head, still not meeting his eyes. “No, I…whatifyoudon’tlikemeafter?” She said it so fast it took Hardison a minute to understand it.

“Not gonna happen, baby.”

“But he didn’t. I must have done it wrong.”

“Who didn’t?” _Oh_ , Hardison thought, _what an asshole._ “You mean he… he seduced you, and then he left you.” He pulled Parker into a hug, more because he needed it than because she did, even with the tears behind her voice. “I wouldn’t do that to you, girl. I’m your pretzel, remember? And I got you.”

She didn’t relax.

Hardison sighed. This was gonna be hard, and in more ways than one.

“Parker, sweetheart. If you don’t want to do this now, I can wait.”

She pulled back just enough to look him in the eye, and that was about as serious as calling him by his first name; this was important to her. “You mean it?” Her voice was tiny, full of tears, and all Hardison could do was nod. “You would do that for me?”

“You’re worth waiting for,” he said simply.

“Then you don’t have to,” Parker replied, and kissed him again.


End file.
